Whitman's inscriptions: the logic of manuscript and civic space in nineteenth-century America

"Whitman's Inscriptions" examines the link between civic space and material practice in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Louisa May Alcott. Combining media studies, bibliography, and urban history, my dissertation argues that these four authors used manuscript as a medium of civic engagement in their published works. In each chapter, my comparative analyses of manuscript practices and published texts examine the historical layers of storage, formatting, and circulation conventions that assumed new forms in literary writing under the specific technological conditions of the industrial-urban era. Walt Whitman is the central figure of my project, as my dissertation title suggests, because his writings record the "noise" of the mid-nineteenth-century's industrial-urban conditions.